Recent Board Gaming

Board Games
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Some light gaming (and significant RPGing) this week! I’ve been through this pattern enough times before; no one is playing an RPG, and someone either says “I want to play a game” or “I want to run a game” and it goes from 0 to 60.

Samarkand (new to me) - Received in a BGG trade, very enjoyable right away. I think most publishers today would never touch a family-weight game where you also have to make change (it comes with paper money).

Favor of the Pharaoh - Presents interesting decisions and never seems to trigger Analysis Paralysis in players that are prone to it. Worth keeping for that alone.

San Juan - I never ask for it (and I don’t own it), but I have managed to play San Juan every year for the past five years.

Pandemic - Really enjoy the In the Lab expansion. Might start asking to play Pandemic, now.

SeaFall - I am the only person in our group who hasn’t become exasperated by the experience of SeaFall at least once, and it’s not my game. I actually enjoy the game, but maybe not the correct group.

Pathfinder - Not a board game, but notable. The last game of Pathfinder I played was November 2011. Since then, I’ve played ongoing games of Freemarket, Blades in the Dark, D&D 5e, The Burning Wheel, and Mouse Guard. The clock struck “Pathfinder”, which means happily digging through lists of feats and monsters again.

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RE: Seafall

I think it’s hitting a lot of people (not just our group) in the wrong ways. I watched a couple of DiceTower reviews and they became super frustrated with it.

The thing about Seafall is Explore is the best move to take more often than not. The new box we opened ratcheted up the difficulty significantly. I expect the next game to go much slower because the new content makes trading and raiding nearly impossible.

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I think Anthony said he liked Seafall? I know that only one person I know liked it, and that all the reviews looked very meh, so we skipped it.

We have three games left of Risk Legacy. The last two wins were dumb event luck. I’ll finish it, but it no longer interests me. (I’m in second place.)

I think we’re playing T.I.M.E. Stories next if we can get the players.

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I’m hate-playing Risk Legacy at this point. Too random, too political. Ameritrash at its finest.

I was spoiled by Pandemic Legacy Season One, which is fantastic.

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Got 4 game nights in over the past 3 weeks.

Pandemic Legacy - Loving this one so far. We lost twice in January but we cut our losses both times and eradicated Blue twice, locking in some nice future-game bonuses that will maybe make it easier? January 1 kicked our ass. January 2 we had a win locked up and lost on something like a 1/17 chance on an Epidemic draw. Oh well!

Evolution - First time playing this one and it’s a neat system for sure. I’m always wary of “it has combat, but purely optional” rules but this seems to work

Camel Up Cards - Was a hit with new-ish gamers. Still better than regular Camel Up

Oshi - Rym taught me this interesting little abstract. (Not even sure if I’m spelling it right). Wondering how it would stack up against similar games (The Duke, Pushfight, Onitama) if I played them all and did a direct compare. Was good but not great.

Amun-Re - Had a chance to learn a Knizia classic and really liked this system. I read up on it since and it turns out that Tasty Minstrel just reprinted it. Also, there is “expert mode” where you draft the starting locations instead of pulling randomly

The Grizzled - One of my favorite co-ops. Lost twice, blowout the first time and quite close the second time. Just couldn’t get over a harsh combo of Hard Knocks. Wound up rules lawyering on whether you could use the lucky charm when your threat symbol is not present. I think the book is a tad vague and nobody has really asked this question on line, so I threw it to BGG. No consensus there either.

Agility - Very solid little 2p game. Played with a friend and borrowed his copy. Going to see how it takes with gamers of different experience levels. It’s from the Morels people.

Super Motherload - Might be my favorite game where deckbuilding is a component. It’s a combination of deckbuilding and tile placement to play dig dug. It’s based off a video game I’ve never heard of.

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It’s based originally off a flash game from, I think miniclip.com back in the 90s. I saw it had a ps4 version. Knew nothing about a card game.

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NOOOO WHY

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Jeremy & I do monthly couples gaming with Knox & his wife.

Tonight we showed them Five Tribes.

At least he didn’t end up winning.

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Some highlights from the past week / Zenkaikon, and cathartic venting about Terminal Directive:

Netrunner - Terminal Directive. TL;DR: the corp gets great cards/effects and the runner gets options ranging from situational to bad. Despite having license to print anything at all without disrupting the meta, the unlockable runner cards are conservative and don’t play nice with core set click economy or TD’s shaper breakers. The act of unlocking things is still fun, but winning games of Netrunner with these cards is frustrating. The HB FA deck on the back of the book will win games. The shaper deck on the back of the book is inconsistent at best. It’s bad. I’m rebuilding it after losing four games in a row, but already Anthony might win the campaign next game… I was expecting a dozen games or so, this will end somewhere in the range of 6-8. After hundreds of games of Netrunner, I was surprised by how the corp’s comparitively powerful ethos effects allowed a novice to effortlessly tax the runner out of centrals and FA to victory (would you rather have $2 when the corp scores an agenda, or $2 each turn where the runner doesn’t make a successful run? Those are in the same box.)

Jump Drive - I’ve found enough absolutely devestating combos to know not to feel bad when someone else pulls them in the next game. It kind of reminds me of Brink of the War in that way - you can’t stall or slow down, it’s all combos all the time.

Neos - I’m starting to really like this the more I play, it strikes a great balance between planning and luck.

Pyramids (new to me) - Went from ‘unsure’ to ‘maybe’ - building the pyramid is actually quite interesting, but the majority scoring feels a bit off. Scores are always very close, though!

Wind the Film! - Continuing to play this. The quality of WtF kept me from trading away the publisher’s other game, Take the “A” Chord, consider that a positive endorsement.

Familiar’s Trouble - Had our best game ever with Rym at Zenkaikon. At one point we set up and swept the whole scoring tableau, and finished with a score in the 40s.

Pastiche (new to me) - My initial reaction was happiness that a modern game had trading and it felt necessary and good - so I was surprised to find Dale Yu had the opposite reaction. I might get more chances to play if Anthony does pick it up.

Samarkand - Despite knowing not to trust the die, and that the game will end sooner than you think, I spent four turns stubbornly rolling the die and falling helplessly behind. It was fun, though.

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Group has been having an insane time with Pandemic Legacy. Two of our three losses so far were utterly shocking last-turn developments. “As long as we don’t draw that one card out of 17 we win…”

Also, passing this on for @Apreche. Dunno if this is your style but guy’s BGG rating history indicates compatibility. BoardGameGeek

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I’d been thinking of getting that Pandemic Legacy game, but we don’t consistently have board gaming get togethers enough to justify it I think.

1 Like
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The MTG Store my friend opened has been branching out into board games and demoing some of them. And I’ve been watching a lot of streams/youtube content with tabletop games in them, namely TableTop, Tabletop Deathmatch (not related) and LoadingReadyRun’s AFK streams. So I’ve actually been getting a little bit into board games.

Recently we played King of Tokyo and it was a blast. Stomping through tokyo is fun and the card illustrations are just great.

Last weekend we played “Ancient Terrible Things” which I unfortunately found rather tedious. It just has so many components to move around and keep track of but in the end it mostly just comes down to having a good dieroll anyway.

I also played a couple of rounds of Zombie Dice, which is a decent enough time filler.

However, the biggest thing so far has been Star Realms. I asked whether they could get the game after seeing it on TableTop and he had just got a six-pack. They sold within a week. I bought my own copy and boy I love this game.

I also ordered my own copies of Betrayal at House on the Hill, Harbour and Carcassonne.

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  • Thurn and Taxis — It’s a grownup version of Ticket to Ride!
  • Temple of Elemental Evil board game — It’s ok. More interesting than Risk Legacy, that’s for sure. We plan to play out its 13 adventures.
  • Can’t Stop — Quick press-you-luck dice game. Great as filler between games or while you’re waiting for people to show up. (Played some newer edition with a cloth board.)
  • The Manhattan Project: Energy Empire — I’m terrible at worker-placement games (getting better?) but I felt like the pieces were falling into place toward the end of this one. I’d definitely play it again.
  • Time Stories — Feels like Baby’s First RPG rather than a board game that promised hot time travel action. Lost the first two times in Asylum, but we’ll try for a third time later this week. @pence, does it get better?
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Played Ponzi Scheme for the first time. Really effective thematically. You are just constantly taking loans that are ridiculously hard to pay off. Game ends when someone goes bankrupt because their house of cards collapses. I recommend this one.

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  • We wrapped up Time Stories: Asylum—the deck that comes with the game— and, boy, was this game a disappointing pile of shit. I think they might buy another deck just to troll me.
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I went to the UK Games Expo with a couple of friends last Friday. Next year we’re definitely going to get more gaming in, but this was our first time there and honestly we spent a lot of the day just wandering around looking at stuff.

My favourite game of the day was Glüx (so much so that I grabbed a copy). It’s an abstract game in which you are trying to control areas of the board by having the most light (highest combined pip total) in them at the end of the game. Everyone starts with eight copies of each of three double sided tokens numbered like opposite sides of a six sided die.

I’ll outline it briefly below, but my description might be a little dry. Basically it’s a short, simple strategy/area control game with a small amount of randomness.

You start by pulling one of your tokens from a bag and placing it either side up on your starting spot. From there play proceeds in turn by taking a token at random and placing it either side up on the board. You can only place your tokens orthogonally from one of your pre-existing tokens at the exact distance shown on the already placed token. Other tokens block movement, but if you land on one exactly you can place yours on top of it. The maximum height of a stack is only 2 high, so this can only be done once on each board space.

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We reviewed that on GN back in 2007!

That was back when we played any new game we acquired constantly until we ruined it. I want to say Thurn got a solid 12+ serious plays.

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On chess, in The Courtier (1528), Baldassare Castiglione wrote:

I think chess has a fault, which is that a man may be too cunning at it. For to be excellent in the play of chess, one must spend so much time on it, and study so much, that one may as soon learn some noble science, or encompass any other matter of importance. And yet after all that labour, one knows no more but a game. Therefore I believe here happens a very rare thing, namely that being average at chess is more commendable than being excellent.

I happen to totally agree. Get average at chess, then expand into different games. At least games that haven’t been solved by computers. Or just skip the step of getting average at chess in the first place.

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That is the main value of the Euro-style tabletop games I enjoy. You explore a full “Chess” experience in compressed fashion, and then move on to another game.

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Almost forgot to share this but here are the plays of a board game con in Uganda.